Forgetting New York

by Editor
August 19, 2014 at 9:27 am

https://www.smartertimes.com/1268/forgetting-new-york

A front-page news article in today's New York Times appears under the headline "Cities Rocked by Past Unrest Offer Lessons." It offers lessons for Ferguson, Mo. from "other cities that endured similar violence." It names "Cincinnati, Oakland, Los Angeles" and Miami and talks about responding to riots and restoring calm. Strangely — bizarrely, actually, the Times omits any mention of New York.

There was a race riot — a pogrom, actually — in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991, which you'd think a newspaper based in New York City might, you know, think about maybe mentioning in a news article about how to respond to an urban riot. The efforts since then to improve relations between the black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights might actually have some lessons for Ferguson.

Maybe Crown Heights was omitted on the grounds that it did not involve what the Times describes as "the fatal shooting of an unarmed back man by a police officer." But that description doesn't apply, either, to the case of Rodney King in Los Angeles. King was not shot by police and he survived the beating. His case is nevertheless included in the Times article. If the Times had been looking for a fatal shooting example, it might have included the case of Amadou Diallo, who was shot by New York City police in the Bronx in 1999. His death did not prompt a riot, but it did prompt organized protests that included mass arrests and civil disobedience. The Diallo shooting isn't included in the Times article, either.

It's not clear what accounts for the Times' neglect of the nation's largest city, the city that appears in the name of the newspaper, in this article. Maybe it has to do with internal bureaucratic divisions in which the national desk is not supposed to tread on the metro desk's turf. Whatever the reason, it strikes this reader as a glaring omission.